This Is My Brain on Books

A Prairie Populist: The Memoirs of Luna Kellie (University of Iowa Press, 1992).   Edited by Jane Taylor Nelsen, Foreword by Albert E. Stone. Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2007) About 1925, Luna Kellie sat down and wrote: Secretary, Historical Society of Nebraska In turning the records of the old State Alliance into your hands, I wish to give a little account of my stewardship. What follows is the account of a life in Nebraska from 1876 to about 1901.   She wrote 160 pages, longhand, on the backs of unused National Farmers’ Alliance membership certificates.   She started with a relatively short political memoir covering her time as secretary of the Populist Nebraska Farmers’ Alliance from 1894.   She then looped back to tell the story of the earlier part of her life, starting with her marriage to J.T. Kellie on the last day of 1874. Luna’s father, J.M. Sanford, filed...

  Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (2020) Willy Ley, Mariner IV to Mars (1966) “In July of 1965, as a tiny octagonal spacecraft swooped across the Martian surface, my father, who had just turned eighteen, was standing tall on a humid, hardwood-forested hill in Appalachia.”   Thus begins Sarah Stewart Johnson’s Sirens of Mars .   Dr. Johnson, a professor of planetary science at Georgetown specializing in extraterrestrial life, deftly weaves the history of our search for life on Mars with her own biography. Mariner IV was the first successful Mars probe.   In a brief flyby, it took temperature and pressure measurements and looked for a magnetic field.   But the public interest was in the 22 photos it took.   Because the Deep Space Network’s link margins were so conservative, the data rate was limited to 8 1/3 bits per second.   It took eight hours for each image to be radioed back to earth, after whi...